Newbie - SVCD quality good but too dark and long processing time

[BillJames310]

First post here, please don't hurt me.

I have been going through the initial learning curve for backing up my DVDs over the past 10 days or so. I'm not a novice computer user though, and do tech support for Windows users and some server support. I've read and re-read the FAQ, beginner and troubleshooting threads, and searched for specific threads on this without much luck. The only ones I found on brightness were at least a year old so I don't know if the suggestions apply to current version of DVD2SVCD.

Basically I want to be able to play my backups on my laptop which does not have a DVD player. It is a fairly powerful laptop, 2 GHz P4 with 512 MB RAM, running XP Pro and Windows Media Player. I see WMP getting dis'd a lot in these forums, but I've found that on XP it does a pretty good job with SVCD, even in full screen mode (not true for the same disk on Win2K or 98).

Once I started using DVD2SVCD my conversion quality went way up and my frustration level went way down, and I have backed up 4 DVDs so far with mostly acceptable quality. My biggest quality problem is the movies are all too dark. Night scenes or dimly lit indoor scenes are difficult to see. This is the case on my laptop LCD screen and also on my desktop CRT screen. On the desktop unit I have PowerDVD and the results are also dark there. I have no reason to use the SVCD disk on my TV, so I want to tweak the results for playback on a computer.

I am pretty much using the default settings for converting to SVCD, ver 1.1.3 build 2.

- DVD Rip tab: Internal ripper normally, although I have used DVD Decrypter on 1 with no problems.
- DVD2AVI: Default settings. A few of the old threads suggest setting contrast to 13 and brightness to 20, but I haven't tried that yet.
- Audio: Defaults of 192 bitrate, downsize to 44.1, stereo, auto detect azid.
- Frameserver: BicubicResize, the Avisynth commands are default (don't understand those so have stayed far away).
- Bitrate: Defaults.
- Encoder: TMPGEnc, Constant Quality (CQ), Highest Quality.

No subtitles. I am not having a CD Image made because I use VCD Image to add an autorun to the root of the CD (as far as I can tell there is no way to do that with the internal imager). I unchecked the "Don't delete any files" box because I am not seeing any use for them, and I always change the default folder before starting.

The machine I am doing the processing on is an AMD XP1700, 512 MB RAM, XP Pro. I've added a new fast WD 120 GB drive dedicated to my backups. I guess a lot of the setting information and the equipment information may not be relevant to my Brightness problem, but leads up to my 2nd problem, the time it takes to process a DVD. I am seeing 10 to 12 hours processing, with nobody else using the computer most of the time. If I could even get under 8 hours it would be acceptable so I can process overnight and while at work.

I can post a log if needed, but since I am not having a specific operation problem I'm guessing it is not needed. The movies that I have ripped are all fairly new movies, The Bourne Identity, Catch Me If You Can, Spiderman, Greek Wedding. All NTSC, some full screen, some wide format. The results are pretty much the same with all.

So, my questions are:

1) What settings do you all suggest to improve the brightness of the SVCD for computer playback?

2) Are there any settings I can tweak to improve performance (shorten the processing time) without reducing quality.

[Kika]

1. There is no optimized Setting for Playback on PCs, because all Monitors and Graphic-Cards are very different.
Don't manipulate Brightness and Contrast in DVD2AVI. If you plan to play your SVCDs sometimes on a DVD-Player, you will be shocked if you do.

2. TMPGEnc-Settings. Highest Quality will NOT give you the best Picture-Quality in most cases, but is consuming lot's of Time. Set it to Motion Estimate or High.

[manono]

Hi and welcome to the forum-

You didn't say what kind of a Video card you have. I don't have a laptop, but most PC vid cards have an Overlay Tab in the advanced portion of the video card settings where you can adjust the brightness permanently.

Failing that, you can always edit the .avs (Frameserver Tab-Edit the AviSynth Script File-Edit When DVD2AVI Is Done) and add a line like this:

Tweak(Bright=10)

Zero is default, and you can brighten it up to 255. After doing that, open the edited .avs in Nandub/VDub and see if it's bright enough for you. Then have DVD2SVCD continue.

[Holomatrix]

Are the settings on the DVD2AVI tab not good to use? Is tweak built into Avisynth, so no Loadplugin? I find my SVCD's a little dark to, even on my TV.
Thanks

[Amit]

There's also a Luminance gain under the DVD2AVI TAB. You can set it to 5 to get your pictures a little brighter. You can set any value but 5 is the number specified in some other thread in the forum for the same issue. I don't have that thread link handy but if you do a search I think you can find. It was related to an issue that APEX plays all the movies in VIVID mode (Little darker than any other player).

Hope this helps.

-Amit

[manono]

Hi-

Are the settings on the DVD2AVI tab not good to use?

I don't know, as I've never used them. Kika says no. Amit says yes. hakko504 in the DVD2AVI FAQ (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=46851) says:
Luminance: Brightness/contrast controls I think, AFAIK not used in v1.76.
Is tweak built into Avisynth, so no Loadplugin?

Yes, that's correct. Whether 2.08 or 2.52, there's no need to load the .dll anymore. Just add the line to your script. Some people prefer to use the Levels command to brighten things up, but I've always found the Tweak Filter real easy to use. It also has settings for Saturation, Contrast and Hue. Here's the Information (http://www.avisynth.org/index.php?page=Tweak) on it.

[Holomatrix]

Ok, thanks, does tweak slow the encode?

[telemike]

Encoder: TMPGEnc, Constant Quality (CQ), Highest Quality. That takes way toooo long.

Try "normal" or 'motion search estimate"

You should drop 2-4 hours off the time on your pc...:)

[gerti67]

Look at the picture link a posted in this thread,

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=54949

I already showed the differences between Tweak and Levels filter - I do prefer the Levels filter because the black borders stay black and do not become light gray as with Tweak or the luminance gain setting in DVD2AVI - this is extremly annoying when letterboxing 2.35:1 anamorphic DVDs for your SVCDs. You'll get big black borders with a visible gray part if you don't crop them before.

HTH,
Gerti

[Nick]

A couple of things

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?threadid=54949&highlight=avisynth+levels

Take a look at this regarding upping the brightness, contrast or gamma to meet your needs. I suspect the gamma change would be most applicable for you. Ignore my answer in that thread, it's crap!

However, adjusting your graphics card settings does seem a more sensible option as I suspect your SVCDs would work fine in a standalone DVD player. All mine have with default settings.

As for the timescale, don't use Highest Quality (as others have said) and you can steal a few extra minutes by not downsampling audio to 44.1Khz - this is time consuming, reduces sound quality and is only done to comply with SVCD specs. However PC's and any standalone DVD player I've ever come across cope fine without downsampling.

The only other thing that gets me is that it seems you only want the backups to play on your laptop. The beauty of SVCD is that the discs will play on standalone DVD players. If PC playback is all you ever want then XviD would get you considerably better quality for the same size files.


EDIT - Damn you Gerti!! you linked to the same thread whilst I was still typing!

[gerti67]

Originally posted by Nick
EDIT - Damn you Gerti!! you linked to the same thread whilst I was still typing! Hehehe, you can call me "Quick fingers!" - :p;):D

[BillJames310]

Wow, thanks for all the speedy replies, gives me a lot to thinks about.

The laptop graphics card is Intel 82845G which uses shared system memory, up to 64 MB of the 512 I have on this system. Adjusting the brightness there doesn't seem to help a great deal but does wash out the display for normal programs so I'm not sure that is going to be worthwhile. I'm seeing the same brightness problem with my Desktop CRT, with WMP and PowerDVD, and 2 other computers I checked, so I thought adjusting the video might be better.

I guess keeping the disk compatible with a standalone player is just low on my priority list at this point, since I have the actual DVD to use there. The way that goes, though, if I don't then somewhere down the road I will wish I had.

So, I think I will try adjusting the avisynth settings and see what happens. I switched to ver 2.08 when I had some problems early on, so I guess I need to switch to 2.51 to do this tweak. I will leave the speed tweaks alone for testing so I can get a better comparison.

Do I have to run through the process from the beginning to make these changes?

[Nick]

Yeah it means a start from scratch but if you rip with internal routines you can select a single chapter to rip (check the faq's for how to do this). Don't downsample the audio and used Constant bit Rate (CBR) for the video. Select "don't make images" and just watch the mpeg file "bbmpeg_muxed_file00.mpg" (or something like that!)in WMP or PowerDVD or whatever.

That way your encode will be like an hour at the most and so you can do a bit of tweaking and testing. As I said before, I think the "levels" filter in avisynth will get your best result.

[Kika]

Are the settings on the DVD2AVI tab not good to use?

I don't know, as I've never used them. Kika says no. Amit says yes.

I said No because they are changing the colors. ;)
Like i said: Monitors/Displays and Graphic-Cards are different. You never find two of them with exactly the same Picture/Color-Quality. So there is absolutly no way to say "Hey, set the Levels to this, it's fine". If you do something like that, Colors may become to dark or to bright on other Displays.

What i ever do is to change less as possible on the Video and never touch the Colors.

My guess on too dark Videos is: There's a bug in one of the Tools. Looks like they are handling the color range the right .

[BillJames310]

I am running a test now using Levels(0,1.3,255,0,255) in avisynth. Also no audio downsample, Motion Estimate Search and Constant Bitrate for Encoder. I grabbed the avisynth line from a suggestion in the thread that was linked here, but I'm not sure I understand enough about that yet to know if it is correct. Doing a test run on The Bourne Identity right now, which is has a lot of dimly lit scenes. Unfortunately I forgot to just select one chapter so I guess I will just let it run through. If it turns out I OK I will use that instead of the conversion I have now.

[BillJames310]

Well darn, I had to restart the PC due to an unrelated problem so I'm still waiting for results, but it does look like the processing time is going to be much better. An additional question comes to mind while waiting:

If the edit added to avisynth works well for me, I would like to make that edit permanent instead of waiting to edit the avisynth script each time. I found several threads, Q71 (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=21859) and here (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=35746), on changing various avisynth settings by loading a customized dvd2svcd.ini file, and I think I can do the Levels this way too, but can't quite understand the scripting syntax used. Can someone give me an example for the code to be used in the dvd2svcd.ini file to add the Level settings to the avisynth script file it generates? Levels(0,1.3,255,0,255)

Thanks again for all the help.

[Nick]

Just one point. When I suggested using CBR that was becase I was advising a single-chapter encode.

Basically you have to compress the video a heck of a lot to get down from DVD capacity to CD-R capacity. The high motion scenes suffer worst when overcompressed. What Variable Bit Rate encoding does is allocate more space on the disc to high motion scenes, saving space on low motion scenes where less data is needed to achieve acceptable quality.

If you are only encoding a single chapter you can not bother with this as even if the maximum SVCD bitrate is used for every scene regardless, it still won't fill the CDR!

So for your full movie encodes always use VBR - the extra quality is worth it. CBR is a good timesaver for test encodes.

Since you started a full movie CBR encode last night I'm just making sure we are clear on that point.

Regarding the Levels filter, read this. Not straightforward stuff but may help you understand what you are tinkering with!

http://www.avisynth.org/index.php?page=Levels

[BillJames310]

Thanks Nick. I misunderstood about CBR. The Levels tweak seems to help, though. As far as scripting it, what I was looking for was the syntax to add it to the dvd2svcd.ini file so it could be read by avisynth without having to do a manual edit each time. Can't seem to get that one figured out. What I thought was correct does nothing. Not a big deal, I guess, since it doesn't take a terrible long time to get to the edit point.

I have started seeing bbMPEG locking up my computer and need to figure out what is going on with that now. Uninstalled all my ripping tools (had played with several prior to starting to use DVD2SVCD), did some general maintenance on the PC, reinstalled. I'm running a new rip now and waiting to see what happens when it gets to that point. Not asking for help on that here, just sort of rambling.

[Holomatrix]

Ok, looks like Levels(0,1.3,255,0,255) brightens everything else to much, I guess I'll stick to C=6 B=4 in the DVD2AVI tab. Since I crop the borders then add later, the lightened border won't affect me.

[r6d2]

Originally posted by BillJames310
Can someone give me an example for the code to be used in the dvd2svcd.ini file to add the Level settings to the avisynth script file it generates? Levels(0,1.3,255,0,255)

If you install the following tool you will learn DVD2SVCD.ini syntax and will have the levels filter incorporated for free: :)

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=55641

For other filters, which I may add later, I changed the script to:


8=Import("C:\Archivos de programa\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\pre.avs")
9=Import(!SemiAutoCropAndResize.avs)
10=Import("C:\Archivos de programa\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\post.avs")


In the pre and post files you may insert filters which will be applied before and after resize, respectively. This way you can tune your movie without editing the INI file or interrupting the encode in the FrameServe tab.

Hope this helps.

[BillJames310]

Here is what I came up with to add the Levels filter automatically. Not sure if it is correct, but in DVD2SVCD when I check off "Edit when dvd2avi is done" on the Frameserver tab, when the popup comes up to edit the script the line that I would have pasted is already there!

Here is what I did (one time setup). I set up DVD2SVCD the way I wanted it for all parameter, then on the Misc. tab I used "Save Settings" to save that configuration to the desktop as gammatest.ini. Then I manually edited gammatest.ini to add my Levels filter in the [AVISYNTH_BicubicResize] section (near the bottom of the file). I chose to put it there simply because that is what I am using.

So, where it used to read:

[AVISYNTH_BicubicResize]
0=BicubicResize(^TargetWidth,^TargetHeight,^b_value,^c_value)
1=AddBorders(0,^BorderTop,0,^BorderBottom)
^b_value=0.0
^c_value=0.6

I changed it to read like this:

[AVISYNTH_BicubicResize]
0=BicubicResize(^TargetWidth,^TargetHeight,^b_value,^c_value)
1=AddBorders(0,^BorderTop,0,^BorderBottom)
2=Levels(0,^Gamma,255,0,255)
^b_value=0.0
^c_value=0.6
^Gamma=1.3

Then, on the Misc. tab, click "Load settings" and load that same .ini file that was just edited. Now, click on the Frameserver tab, and with BicubicResize selected in the top dropdown, you have Levels in the list of commands list now. Clicking on the elipse (...) next to levels and you can change the gamma property if desired. see it (http://www.billsway.com/gamma.jpg) This will become a permanent part of dvd2svcd.ini file, so you do not have to do this but once if you want all conversions to be brighter. Remember that the default for gamma is 1 to eliminate the gamma correction. Avisysynth Levels settings (http://www.avisynth.org/index.php?page=Levels)

To test, leave "Edit when dvd2avi is done" checked and process the DVD. When the script edit window comes up, you should see the exact line already there that would have been pasted manually.

No more waiting to make the manual edit.